Quarters Inside Fort Wagner

Two long wooden barracks stand inside the earthworks of Battery Wagner, men posted along the crest above them, the parade swept flat and bare in front. Cooley photographed it in April 1865, and the Library of Congress calls it the quarters of the Federal garrison.

Wagner had cost the Federals fifty-eight days and some 2,400 men to take, and the photograph is what victory eventually looked like: not a breach or a flag, but two barracks and a swept yard on a work whose defenders had walked away eighteen months before, on the night of 6–7 September 1863, by boat and unpursued.